Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Friday, October 29, 2004

Hiatus Until November 4

I've taken on a new client and will be away from my computer
through Thursday, November 4. No new entries until then and I
won't be able to answer your e-mail messages, either.

In the meantime, let me point you at some classic
content you might enjoy:

This
shortie (well, for me anyway) on last off-season's
Yankee planning.

This
one on the pre-2004 season Texas Rangers, a surprise team
(w/gratuitous Green Monster reference).

If you'd like pointers to a couple of always-engaging
blogs, there's:

Doug
Pappas' site. His death earlier this year meant the end of an
inexhaustible, original and wise mind, but his works survive
thanks to SABR. I love going back and re-reading Pappas' work.

Tom Peters' very active site.
Not just a lone management consultant, Peters has a collection of
clever people who work with him and post to the blog, too. Not
every idea is an earth-shaker, but reading regularly will shake
up your thinking (if you let it) and that will lead to better
understanding, as well as insights of your own.

Finally, if you read this before Tuesday, I strongly urge you to get out and vote. It's the very smallest contribution a citizen can make back to her country. Vote for somebody. And if you hate every single candidate and issue on the ballot, you haven't invested enough attention, but you can always write in "None of the Above". There is no excuse not to vote, to stand up for your nation's ideal.

10/29/2004 08:34:00 PM posted by j @ 10/29/2004 08:34:00 PM

Monday, October 25, 2004

Part III - The Carlos BeltránYou're Missing Out On

With the benefit of his (a) being on a team that made the
playoffs, and (b) totally coming to chew bubble gum and kick ass,
Carlos
Beltrán, the Houston Astros' center-fielder finally got the
national attention his skill level merits. In large
organizations, there are usually at least a dozen Carlos
Beltráns lurking hidden, performing at a high level but not
noticed either because they work in a low-profile area, work for
a manager who doesn't realize it, or work for a manager who's
keeping their star hidden.

HIMMICANE CARLOS

In the 55 playoff plate appearances he notched, Beltrán (The
Manati Manatee) hit a Bondsian 8 homers, averaged .435, with a
smokin' on-base of .535, a caliente 1.020 slugging percentage and
produced an OPS of 1.555. He stole 6 bases, and didn't get caught
once.

Sometimes players put up sweet looking numbers in a playoff
series or two and while those numbers look good, on occasion the
numbers are a little empty of torque delivered because they don't
actually help the team score runs. But his hitting actually
helped his team, too. His 14 RBI puts him almost in Hack Wilson
territory for those 12 games, and the 21 runs he scored are in
the stratosphere; that hitting really resulted in run yield all
around.

Of course, he's a skilled outfielder with a good throwing arm,
too, and for people who value the stolen base, a prolific base
thief who gets caught about as often as Seal releases an album of
AC/DC covers (he was 42 steals -3 caught this season, improving
on his 35-4 lifetime season composite average). A side note here: Steals have become
discredited, because on composite average, unless you can succeed
more than two-thirds of your attempts, the net benefit of the
bases you steal becomes a net-negative. In our current baseball
environment, with the juiced ball and lots of extra-base hits,
losing a runner to a stolen base becomes even more
"expensive". Take this year's Juan "Perhaps Not As Lucky As We
Thought" Pierre:
Pierre successfully pilfered 45 sacks this season, but was put
out trying 24 times, so for all his success, it appears
(context plays a part, so we can't be sure from looking at these
season numbers) his base-stealing efforts undermined his Florida
Marlin team's offense. But this voting the stolen base off the
island thing is only reasonable for the composite average. The
reality is, if you can steal 42 bases in a season and only get
caught 3 times, the net advantage is about like hitting an extra
16 doubles. His level of accomplishment, if he can keep it up
another four years or so, would put him among the all-time stolen
base percentage leaders, and one of the few players in history
who both stole a lot of bases and managed to contribute a lot
doing it.

All of a sudden, there are a lot of interesting stories are
circulating about Beltrán mostly, now that the Astros are
sitting on the sidelines, speculation about where his free agency
in the off-season might take him. But he's been discovered after
toiling in relative obscurity for five years in Kansas
City away from the coasts where national media live and focus,
and on a team that has been out of playoff contention for all but
six months of his career.

It's brutal that a contributor this talented could be so
overlooked by so many. But not uncommon.

BEYOND BASEBALL

In big organizations, the wasting of talent is pandemic. The
larger the organization, the more likely someone can be a star
performer and be overlooked. ¿Why does this happen?

Most frequently, it's because a contributor works in a
low-profile area. Big organizations have their star groups
that are showered with resources and praise, and their grunt
groups that, while equally necessary, aren't viewed as
"sexy" or appealing. It's not universal, but as a rule
a successful organization's sales department will be very good at
selling themselves as important, and sales-men and -women are
likely to rise up in a hierarchy with some success -- their
personal skill set benefits them. On the other hand, people who
do operations or work in the warehouse in a line or managerial
capacity will generally get overlooked relative to their
contribution. Again, the skill set required to be successful
in operations doesn't include marketing oneself and therefore
will exist in a lower ratio of successful contributors. It's not
just business: in the military, there are special forces and the
Air Force, and these have a lot more star quality than the
equally necessary infantry and their slogging and grunt work. In
academia, most four-year colleges maintain departments they need
to have for a balanced list but that are not well-endowed or
treasured, while other departments get most of the gravy and
glory.

In under-valued areas, people can be stars, but they're being
stars at something that the organization has forgotten one can be
a star at. If you work in a big organization, I'll bet you have a
number of these floating around, under-recognized or perhaps
unrecognized.

Sometimes, the star is hidden because the contributor's
manager is afraid to lose her or is just not a promoter. I
see this sometimes. The department manager, while valuing the
star, is just so focused on inputs and outputs that the manager
makes no special effort to promote the star's work outside the
department. Frequently, this is part of a personality setting of
the manager; he or she is not a people-focused manager, or in the
family he grew up in the parents made no effort to praise,
assuming "one should just know", and saving feedback
for negative situations. Overcoming one's family upbringing and
the way that experience can infiltrate one's managerial patterns
is Third Base in the Management
By Baseball model.

Finally, the nastiest reason. Sometimes the star is hidden because
the manager is afraid to share the limelight, either because
it might put him or her in the position of having a replacement
on hand (making the manager more disposable) or because the
manager's ego doesn't sit comfortably with sharing any benefits
that might come with glory. This reason is the more neurotic and
hardest to overcome. It is more prevalent when then manager's
neurotic behavior is fueled by the organization's wider neurosis:
a place where employment bulimia (layoffs or restructurings as a
normal response to difficulties) is a way of being, there are
logical as well as neurotic incentives for this managerial
behavior.

It's likely there are Carlos Beltráns in your organization,
overlooked, under-appreciated stars. If you find them and promote
them, they, and you, can boost your organization's production.

10/25/2004 07:33:00 AM posted by j @ 10/25/2004 07:33:00 AM

Friday, October 22, 2004

Part II - The Man Who Shopped Liberty Beltrán:Surviving Ridicule to Try Again

One of the hottest playoff heroes has been Carlos Beltrán,
the Houston Astros' center-fielder. There are a lot of
interesting stories circulating about him since the Astros earned
their wild card berth, from his home-runs-in-consecutive-games
streak to speculation about where his free agency in the
off-season might take him.

To a management consultant, though, the three stories about
Beltrán, known as the Manati Manatee, that are the most
worthwhile haven't been batted about much. One is an instructive lesson
in mentoring, this entry is a lesson in managerial courage,
and one is about a universal trend all managers would do well to
pay attention to.

WHAT IS (BOLD) PAST IS (BOLD) PROLOGUE

This year's Houston Astro team has been looking at its last
shot, with some aging veterans and some good contributors about
to become free agents. After this season, it'll probably be a
couple of years before the team is this good again, though it
likely will be, with some good young talent and some
prime talent already on the roster.

In mid-summer, with the team in contention but not well ahead,
Astro G.M. Gerry Hunsicker went shopping for help. He didn't just
have this deal in mind. As with any respectable manager,
he considered the past and meant to learn from it.

Six years ago at the trade deadline, Hunsicker traded for one
of the best pitchers in baseball, Randy Johnson. It was
expensive; Johnson was going to become a free agent at the end of
the year and Hunsicker knew it was unlikely the Astros would be
able to re-sign him, so whatever assets they gave up for him were
gone for good with only two months of Johnson's services as the
reward (three months if they made the playoffs and won).

The Astros gave the Seattle Mariners the franchise's former #1
ranked pitching prospect no longer at the top of their list (John
Halama), a rising AAA pitcher with high upside (Freddy Garcia),
and a AAA shortstop considered useful but not exceptional (Carlos
Guillén). Without putting the trade in context, it's
"clear" Hunsicker got shorn. In exchange for 11
starts from Johnson (the number of regular season starts
he would be able to pitch), the G.M. was coughing up three
young players, all of whom looked to have major league careers of
some value.

You can't make a lot of deals like this, because even when
they work out, you are eating your seed grain. But if your team
just needs an extra on-field, emotional and fan-excitement jump,
a bold move like trading for an exceptional Big Unit like Johnson
has rewards that, in this context, can cover the cost in a way
that seems improbable if you remove the context. Hunsicker didn't
try to get someone pretty-good and better than his least-good
everyday player, which has some value, he got one of those rare
assets my friend Phil Barber calls a "difference
maker".

Hunsicker played "Shoot the Moon", and it paid off
in regular season wins and attendance and buzz.

Before the trade, those 1998 Astros were a very good 65-44 (.596
and 3½ games up in their division).
After the trade they were a transcendent 37-16 (.698
and winning their division by 12½ games).
Yes, they were 10-1 during the stretch drive when Johnson
started, but they were also 27-15 in games he didn't start
(.642).
They were simply playing much better with Johnson. He made a
difference in their success even on days he wasn't pitching.

The Astros' momentum did not serve them well in their first
round playoff against the San Diego Padres, and they were
eliminated. And at that point, much of the punditocracy decided
Hunsicker was a fool -- he had mortgaged some bright potential
future for a risk that didn't pan out.

Their criticism, on the surface, held much truth. In the
immediate accounting, his bold Randy Johnson move didn't get them
a World Series trophy and the cost was high. But the rewards
appeared through other measures -- attendance, longer-term fan
loyalty, a sense among staff, players and fans that the franchise
was aggressively committed to success and one that lingered after
1999.

A good risk doesn't always pan out. Acquiring Randy Johnson
might not yield a Series trophy, I might buy a tickets to a
Johnny Winter concert where he can't play lead anymore, or buy
Honda that turns out to be a lemon, Warren Buffet might buy a
stock he sells for a below-market return.

THE MAN WHO SHOPPED LIBERTY BELTRÁN

Having taken so much heat from so many quarters for the bold
deal, a weaker general manager could have frozen up or would
likely have avoided making the same kind of deal.

Hunsicker did it again this season.

On June 24, he traded for Beltrán, the disappointed Kansas
City Royals' most valuable contributor, scheduled to become the
most glittery free agent at the end of the year, and a player the
well-heeled New York Yankees both can afford and need. Moreover,
the outfielder's agent is the notorious Scott Boras, a brutal
negotiator who always pushes his players to take the highest $$
offer (regardless of other factors), meaning the attempt to get
the player's services will be simply an auction. Further,
Beltrán expressed a desire to play for a team that could get
into the playoffs every year (having spent the first five years
of his six-year career without experiencing playoffs), and
Houston is not clearly going to be there again -- especially if
they fling at Beltrán the resources it will probably take, a
Kekulé ring because to sign him you need to have a dominant
roster, but to have that kind of roster, you need more $$ than
you can walk away with after signing him. It's not impossible,
but quite unlikely.

So after six years, Hunsicker made the bold mid-season move
for the partial season player. He coughed up the best reliever
from the Astros' very deep bullpen & a promising (not
dominant) young catcher. While the Astros had plenty of hope for
other relievers to take over, they will need help at catcher
soon. But to all appearances, he didn't hesitate, he didn't let
the fear of being ridiculed and second-guessed deter him from the
bold move, even though it might not get the team an obvious
long-term benefit.

This move did not appear to work out right away. On the day
the Astros acquired the Manati Manatee, the team was 38-34, 5
games out of first. By August 14, they were 56-60, 19½ games
back, and 7 games behind that day's best wild card record.

Hunsicker had a couple of weeks to shop Beltrán to a team
looking for a boost. Apparently, he did but ultimately decided
the returns were lower than the rewards of keeping the
contributor. At the risk of getting hammered for the same bold
move again, the Astros front office kept him.

The bold move worked out this time. The team went 13-3 through
the rest of August, and tacked on a blistering 23-7 September,
with enough wins to snare the wild card berth & enough
adrenaline to get past the Atlanta Braves and win their
first-ever playoff series. Again, the off-field benefits accrue
to the franchise, especially important because on paper
this is a team due for at least a short period of decline. The
dollars they will reap from the good will of the 2004 effort,
spear-headed in part by Beltrán and the meta-meaning of
Hunsicker's willingness to be bold in pursuit of a flag or a
trophy, are more valuable than they would be to a team likely to
have another roaring season next year. They are more valuable
because the fan base now has the marination in good feelings that
can potentially nurture another ~3 million ticket season
next year (especially if oil prices stay above $45/bbl. and
gasoline in the $2.10-$3.50 range) even if the team is scratching
around .500.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Most managers fall into to one of two extreme categories: they
either (a) won't allow the past or the evidence of real failure
deter their internal world views (a failure to achieve 3rd
base in the Management by Baseball Model) & continue to
repeat past failures, or (b) they allow fear of others'
perceptions deflect them from pursuing high returns that might
not work out.

The Astros front office is good example of healthy
decisionmaking in this area -- six years after a bold move that
the pundit class decided was a loser, Gerry Hunsicker did it
again, not because he didn't realize the cost, but precisely
because he saw both sides of the equation and had enough courage
weather the knee-jerk fear that drives much of the criticism.

In your own organization, let Hunsicker and the Astros front
office be a beacon. This doesn't mean you don't need to run the
numbers, so the algebra, ignore your failures. But just as every
random move doesn't result in failure, not every optimal move
doesn't result in success. If that immutable fact scares you,
management is not a good fit -- there are many careers where it
won't make much difference, and a few where it will actually
benefit you, but management is not one of them.

So will the Astros pull off another bold mid-season deal? I
suggest it's not if but when, and I hope the
success of this one doesn't make ownership trigger-happy. I
suspect Hunsicker, left to his calculations, will know the
"right" time to snare his next Big Unit or Manati
Manatee.

10/22/2004 08:18:00 AM posted by j @ 10/22/2004 08:18:00 AM

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Part I: Managing Carlos Beltrán -- Investing in Quality Yields

One of the hottest playoff contributors is Carlos Beltrán,
the Houston Astros' center-fielder. There are a lot of
interesting stories circulating about him since the Astros earned
their wild card berth, from his home-runs-in-consecutive-games
streak to speculation about where his free agency in the
off-season might take him.

To a management consultant, though, the three stories about
Beltrán that are the most worthwhile haven't been batted about
much. One is an instructive lesson in mentoring, one a lesson in
courage, and one is about a universal trend all managers would do
well to pay attention to.

MENTORING THE VERY GOOD

Second base in the Management
by Baseball Model is managing people. You can't just
be good at people management and expect to be very good, but once
you've mastered first base (operational management), it's the
next critical area a manager needs to master.

Allard Baird, the Kansas City Royals' general manager, has
shown a good example of a little-known but very rewarding
technique that's especially useful in our current rent-a-body
climate where the talent doesn't stay in any one job very long.

Baird offers himself up as an active mentor to team players
who are willing to take mentoring and maintains the relationship
with them once they leave. In baseball, leaving is common, but
it's especially pronounced for a franchise like the Royals that
more often than average doesn't offer bids for prime-career
talent that will match offers made by other teams. Case in point:
Beltrán, who is going to be the most-attractive position player
in the free agent pile this winter. Beltrán is a skilled hitter
who hits for pretty good power and pretty good average, plays a
skill position with very good success, has a positive arm and is
an excellent base-runner and stealer.

With the Royals' season in a shambles, and with the
opportunity to squeeze a little value out of the Royals'
investment in Beltrán, Baird traded him in late June to the
Houston Astros, a team with a shot (and determination) to make
the playoffs.

But, according to The Sporting News' Ken Rosenthal, that was
not the end of Baird's relationship with Beltrán.

Royals general manager Allard Baird on Astros CF Carlos Beltran, whom he parted with in a
three-team trade earlier this season: "I'm really proud
of him. I call him about every 2-2 1/2 weeks. He'll call back
and update me on how he's doing. I think a lot of the kid on
a personal level and professional level. He's got a chance to
be as good as he wants to be. Now he's on a stage where
everyone can see that."

Baird is not bitter about losing Beltrán to a wealthier,
currently-more successful team. Their relationship, a work
relationship not a friendship, continues beyond
Beltrán's tenure with Baird and the Royals. Baird (deservedly)
chooses to see Beltrán's success as an extension of his own
success, without having to dress up in a rabbit suit and jump up
& down signalling it to the world.

The reward for Beltrán, who had played
his whole major league career in the American League and for
the Royals, is an element of continuity, this connection with
someone who knows him as a contributor. Like a young person goes
off to college but can drive home for the weekend to do laundry
and get some emotional support, a contributor who moves on to
another department or another organization benefits from some
transition time, some additional perspective on her new
environment.

The reward for Baird is that, by maintaining his relationship
with Beltrán, he gets an extra pair of eyes, possible scouting
(so-and-so who you played against is in the trade market...would
he fit in here? That manager, what does he tend to do?), and
perhaps the chance to re-acquire the contributor later in his
career either when Beltrán moves on to another organization or
Baird does. Moreover, if Baird is looking for work for himself or
another protege, Beltrán might prove to be a reference or a
contact or an instigator. And if the contributor participates in
some innovation elsewhere, the mentor might get advance insight
into it.

Maintaining a long-term work relationship with quality
individuals is worthwhile -yes- emotionally, but there are
solid business reasons, too.

Be like Allard Baird. Invest a little extra in your charges
while they are with you; help build their careers and don't
assume that mutual reward should stop when they move on.

In the next entry, I'll
elaborate on the second nifty lesson relating to Beltrán -- the
courage of a manager in doing the right thing even when that
manager has been lambasted for doing it previously.

10/19/2004 09:19:00 AM posted by j @ 10/19/2004 09:19:00 AM

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Cognitive Terrorism: A LaRussa TacticYou Might Use

The last entry was about a basic personality duality in
managers, a spectrum of "settings" that determine the
way a manager will make any important decision and will shade the
way the manager will make even small decisions. I used Tony
LaRussa as an exemplar for one of the ends of the spectrum.

I used to watch LaRussa in action a lot, back when I lived in
Oakland and a company I worked with had season tickets to the As
and was very generous with them. But that was hundreds of games
ago, & I'd forgotten until Brian at (the insightful and
well-written and extraordinarily entertaining...whew) Redbird Nation
reminded me a specific LaRussa tactic that some other very good
managers have had: What I call Cognitive Terrorism (CT).

COGNITIVE TERRORISM: THREAT OR MENACE?

In a very competitive situation, CT is the application of a
sudden change away from expected behavior when engaged with an
antagonist who either pre-plans his path and doesn't like to
change (think Gene Mauch) or who takes a lot of time to process
alternatives. As Brian noted about LaRussa:

La Russas strategy is built on
getting in the other teams head, disrupting them. Hell
often go against book for no other reason than keeping his
opponents on their toes. Ive seen him try almost
anything to rattle the other team (or rally his own team): hell
yell at umps; hell get himself thrown out of games; hell
have the umpires check the opposing pitcher for cheating; hell
start a war of words with the other teams star players
(Barry Bonds, twice) or their managers (notably Dusty Baker,
several times). He will use any strategy to obtain an edge.

This is within the realm of the behavior I previously
wrote about as Seeker behavior, but all managers with the
appropriate knack for it can exercise CT, even if they're
not a Seeker.

The prerequisites for success as a CT artist are:

A good knowledge of The Book (beyond baseball, standard
operating procedure, or commonly-accepted standards), its
limits, and just how far you can innovate off of it
without going into an event horizon,

A natural interest in examining and deconstructing
competitors' habits and biases,

An ability to get to a "good-enough" decision
very quickly, that is, quick thinking, which is not the
same as intelligence though it can accompany it,

An ability to appear calm on the outside even when one
doesn't feel that way.

Earl Weaver used to run this game against Gene Mauch. While
pundits criticized Earl for being a "push-button"
manager, he varied a lot in seasons and adapted his tactics from
season to season based on opponents and the basic environment
(the liveliness of the ball, etc.). Mauch really was a
push-button manager. He simplified his life by mentally charting
generically optimal strategies and then before games examined the
day's situation and tweaked his settings a little, but went into
a game and operated without changes as much as any well-known
manager in the 20th Century. Mauch was a real S.O.P. guy who
would make any Boeing or Ford Motor or General Electric proud,
smart and pre-meditated.

For that reason, Weaver could play him like a drum set. Weaver
could put a pinch-hitter in the on-deck circle who would trigger
Mauch's autonomic response of putting in a specific pitcher and
then Weaver would change hitters getting the exact match-up he
was looking for. In at least one case, Mauch changed pitchers
before the pinch-hitter was even announced, leaving the original
P.H. untapped and available later.

Weaver reveled in these manipulations of the autonomic or
slow. Because he enjoyed it, I believe he sometimes did it even
when he didn't need to, just for fun. I think LaRussa does, too.
There's a certain pursuit-of-knowledge kind of manager who
thrives on the edges (this goes specifically to Seeker behavior,
as Brian notes). And both of them applied this both in regard to
in-game tactics, but also sometimes just to elicit an emotional
response. Weaver could not easily out-tactic Billy Martin, for
example, because Martin was just as fluid and almost as
innovative as Weaver, but Martin behaved as though he had a
couple of severe personality disorders, and Weaver knew with
almost-perfect certainty how to get Martin to blow his top, and
Martin with top blown, a little distracted, yielded a small edge
to Weaver.

But even if you're the opposite, a Raver who is managing risk
instead of opportunity, you can use this tactic to some degree.
If your antagonist/competitor is a by-the-book, very predictable
operator, you can give the illusion that you are pursuing a
certain line to which you know she'll respond autonomically --
without radically changing your own direction, you can make your
antagonist/competitor waste cycles or resources and go off in a
direction that undermines the antagonists objectives.

BEYOND BASEBALL

I've used this CT approach with great satisfaction in the
past. I once had a staff job with a new department. The
already-powerful manager of a related department who had hoped to
inherit the sceptre for the new department and fold it into his
own empire was very upset at losing this plum. Upper management
knew he was not a start-up guy, while he was incredibly
intelligent and incredibly ambitious and driven, he just didn't
have the skills.

Weasel Boy, as he was known around the organization, set off
on a Holy War to prove the new department was badly run and
failing. Because the new department was providing services to his
existing empire (he was our main customer), he would come to me
with a long list of impossible demands. It was our job to service
his demands as best we could. Upper management, while strong
enough to realize his limitation, wouldn't intercede because it
was very very weak-minded and driven by a fellow with severe
Billy Martin-like personality disorders.

I had made a choice early on that the way to build the group
was to attain a quality unrivalled in the industry, and amp up
quantity once we had mastered the process and procedures and
research needed for the quality targets. So he saw that as our
weakness, and tried to push a quantity of work at us that would
break both our quality and our ability to deliver. He would come
to our department and engage in debate about what he needed and
when (not dialogue, not negotiation, debate), and it became
apparent to me he always prepared rigorously, like a presidential
candidate for a debate (If she says this, I'll say that).
He was the Gene Mauch of antagonists. And because this was a
zero-sum game sadly (he could only "win" if I
"lost" and vice-versa), it constrained the arguments
available to him. He became very predictable.

He would come over for a debate, and I'd know exactly what
Weasel Boy was going to say, and I would always have a return
that was completely different from anything for which he had
prepared. He was very intelligent, far moreso than I am, but
Weasel Boy is deliberate, a pre-planner who finds it hard to come
to a conclusion, but once he reaches it, finds it hard to change
away from it. "But you didn't say that last time!" he'd
sputter, his Army Corps of Engineers Master Plan in tatters.

As he lost his composure, I pretended to be totally calm, exhibiting a tranquil, impassive monkish persona (think LaRussa), which only un-nerved the already-agitated Weasel Boy more

I always nailed him in these debates, he always left
muttering.

I took great joy in it, and as much for the satisfaction of
knowing I was leaving him dazed and confused as for the fact that
I knew our group was doing the right thing for the organization,
keeping on the path of the most productive approach we could
execute given our mission and resources.

A note in Weasel Boy's defense,
I should relate that outside of work, he was able to
vary. He's a kind-hearted guy, believe it or not, and at a key
moment in his life when he needed to be attentive and adaptive,
he aced it completely. He and another employee were lured out to
a business meeting with a troubled man who had either a bomb or
an automatic weapon (I can't remember which anymore) and who
intended probably to kill them and other people in the vicinity
and then himself. Weasel Boy maintained his cool in this
completely unpredictable, original situation and talked the
fellow out of it and they disarmed him peacefully. Why he
couldn't express even a shadow of a dream of this skill in a work
situation, I know not, but when it counted, he was an ace.

The complete master of the Weaver/LaRussa ability outside
baseball is Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Foundation. There are volumes about his strategy
and tactics,
and I recommend them strongly if you're interested in learning
how someone who is incomparable at fluid problem-solving plans
and executes. You may disagree with his means, his ends, or both,
but studying this master will be enlightening regardless.

IN SUM

Either risk-avoider or opportunity-seeker, you can use CT to
upset your antagonists, cause them to use up resources worrying
about what you might do, get them off their game. If you have the
aptitudes for it and you're quick enough to do this without
spending more time devising strategies than you cause your
opponents to invest trying to overcome it, you win.

10/16/2004 10:12:00 AM posted by j @ 10/16/2004 10:12:00 AM

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

In my management coaching consults, one of the first things I try to assess in an individual who's either a manager or about to become one is where they are on the scale of risk-avoidance at one pole and opportunity-driven at the other. Risk-Avoiders
("Ravers") and Opportunity-Seekers
("Seekers") in their purest forms will use their tendency on this scale as their primary filter for what-to-do in a specific situation.

The St. Louis Cardinals organization and their field manager Tony LaRussa are clear examples of Seekers. Something LaRussa allegedly said to TV announcer Tim McCarver this week is a telling indicator of LaRussa's relentless Seeker behavior.

The Cards took two quick games from their 1st round NL playoff opponents, the Dodgers, needing just one more game to win the series. In the third game they faced one of those rare but never surprising José Lima dominating starts and were crushed. The Cards were disappointed at having to play more games, and more challenging they had to use as their starter Jeff
Suppan. Suppan had gone into the playoffs with four consecutive sub-standard starts. The last of those bad starts (Sept. 29) synchronized with the schedule so Suppan's spot was "due" to appear as the first playoff starter. LaRussa had used other pitchers in a way to rest his other starters, so Suppan didn't pitch in the last games of the regular season, had days off before the playoffs and didn't appear in the first three playoff games. He had had 11 days rest, and while rest is considered a good thing, many pitching experts agree 11 days is "too much". You'd have to consider Suppan rusty at that point.And LaRussa didn't have a better starter who wasn't rusty to throw in there.

To the punditocracy, LaRussa was stuck in Game 4 with Suppan, a guy with a bad streak at the end of the season who had then gotten rusty on top of it. Not that he was moldy refritos -- the Cards were 21-10 in games Suppan had started; Suppan just wasn't an optimal playoff starter in that situation.

But LaRussa is a Seeker. McCarver reported LaRussa said while he wasn't happy about not having swept the series, the good part of having to play a Game 4 was getting to use Suppan.

That's classic Seeker world-view. Confident it wasn't a dire situation, the manager was taking what good he could out of it. The benefits: getting Suppan some work; if Suppan was okay, knowing he could use him again; if Suppan wasn't okay and still in his late September funk, having an arguable reason to not use him as a starter in the next series. I'm sure he saw other benefits, too.

And, by the way, this situation happened to work out for LaRussa and the Cards:

Suppan pitched effectively, the Cards advanced to the next round, and the team gets to align its starting rotation the way it wanted to even if it hadn't had to play this game.

Baseball is largely a domain of Seekers, especially when the ball is lively and big innings, not one-run innings decide
(probabalistically) the outcome of most games. In highly competitive endeavors, A Seeker tends to do better than an equally-gifted Raver.

RAVERS & SEEKERS BEYOND BASEBALL

In my experience, there's no bell curve distribution with a few folk at each end of this continuum and an increasing count as you get towards the middle. In reality, there are a surprising number at the extremes, a big peak on each end about two-thirds out towards each end, and a smaller fruited plain in between. In sum, most organizations' managers are naturally-inclined towards one pole or the other. And because of Angus' First Law (Most human systems are self-amplifying), organizations will trend strongly towards either one pole or the other over time because most managers who exhibit the opposite side will be winnowed out from above or will remove themselves to find a more compatible organization.

Ravers try to win my never erring, by relentless pruning of efforts and behaviors that might generate or proliferate a mistake. Think of those great National League games you get that end 2-1, where the team that won was the better Raver, the team that managed not to walk the fast runner, that had no errors, that wasted no at bat. I worked with Boeing for a couple of years, and the value of "safety", so vital to the manufacture and maintenance of passenger aircraft, permeated the social values of the company that even if you were building something as naturally defect-laden during construction as a computer program, you weren't allowed to use the word "crash". Ravers don't like the future much, because the future is populated with so many chances to make mistakes. There are healthy Ravers and neurotic Ravers: the healthy ones try to predict the future, the neurotic ones try to pretend it doesn't exist or that it won't change the definition of safe behavior.

Seekers exploit, run up the score, try to find the hidden edges, aim for the great côup, and see the future as a set of circumstances that will exist to be exploited. The more treacherous that future, the more advantageous it is to the Seekers. I worked with Fleetfoot Messenger Service for over a decade, and their president is always balancing present behavior with future, projecting economic and demographic and technology trends and aggressively pursuing whatever makes sense, whether it's buying out failing rivals, transforming his business model, tapping into new technologies. Change is his friend. There are neurotic Seekers, as well, unable to be present in the present, ignoring obvious signs that risk is overwhelming any return the opportunity might yield (think Enron or late arrivals at multi-level marketing schemes).

Seekers tend to be more successful in volatile environments, Ravers tend to be successful in static ones.

But the Seeker world view is almost perfectly-described by LaRussa's comment to McCarver. It's looking for the opportunities in each situation, each environment, and not looking back but looking forward. Seeker behavior isn't Pollyanna reflux ("There must be a pony"), it's a realization that no matter how much horse pucky the Fates have dumped in your living room, there are going to be returns from your efforts in this spot.

Unless you're already an extreme Seeker, you can benefit from chanelling a little LaRussa when faced with a less-than-optimal situation. Find the benefits, and squeeze all the positives out of them that you can, while being realistic about the situation itself.

10/13/2004 09:56:00 AM posted by j @ 10/13/2004 09:56:00 AM

Sunday, October 10, 2004

This week in the playoffs, Minnesota Twins manager Ron
Gardenhire pulled what I call "a Fregosi". If you read
this and internalize the lesson, you have a chance to protect
yourself from the equivalent in your own non-baseball management
arena.

Pulling a Fregosi (maybe I'll call this Defoliating a
Gardenhire in the future) is when you find yourself at a
decision juncture and are more focused on looking in the
rear-view mirror (the past) than on looking forward through the
windshield (the future). Doing so guarantees a higher level of
emotional response, and a lack of attention to the possibilities
of the future.

Gardenhire defoliated himself in this week's Game #2 between
his Twins & the Yankees, turning a potential coup de grace
into a turning point that buried his team.

This is a five-game series, so you are never in a position of
being able to finesse one game (take a loss) to preserve or
increase your chances to win a later one.

Tied at 5, bottom of the 10th, vast advantage to home team
(Yankees). Twins skipper Gardenhire brings in his best reliever,
Joe Nathan, at the start of the inning to protect the team's
chances. He's already used two of his lesser relievers. Nathan
had pitched an inning the night before.

Nathan's perfect in the 10th. The Twins can't score in their
half of the 11th.

He comes back for the 11th. He's perfect again.

The Twins score a lone run in the top of the 12th on Torii
Hunter's homer.

Gardenhire has a decision point here. On the side of taking
his pitcher out, Nathan's not pitched more than two innings in
relief this season, plus he'd pitched a (short uneventful) inning
the night before. In favor of rolling him out again, Nathan's
started in previous seasons. And the following day is a sorta-day
off, a travel day, so he can get some recharge. And he's been
pitching well this night.

Gardenhire rolls him out. This, imnsho, is a questionable
decision but not a bad decision. His alternatives are
relievers he'd prefer not to use and bottom-of-the-rotation
starters he planned on not using to start in this series

The point is not, as some have argued over the last few days,
that Nathan shouldn't have come out to start the 12th, his 3rd,
inning. The point is, once Nathan had proven he didn't have
enough control left to throw strikes to the Yankee line-up's
weakest batter, you didn't need to let him throw to the top of
their order, that is, Mr. October Junior, The $200 Million Eddie
Haskell, and then the best hitter on the team, all with one out and
the tying run at the plate. There's no amount of confidence in
Nathan, no level of commitment expressed by this act, no
warm-fuzzies towards his reliever (who, true, is a big reason the
Twins are a successful a team as they are) that's going to get
Nathan out of his Own Private Idaho here.

He's toast, a crispy critter, moundkill. At this point even a
bottom-of-the-rotation starter you hoped you wouldn't have to
use, even possibly Terry "Last Good Season Was In The Last
Century" Mulholland (just kidding...I wouldn't bring in a
lefty to face Jeter, A-Rod & Sheffield), but definitely any
right-handed pitcher who could fog a mirror (perhaps Kyle Lohse,
as bad as he'd been recently), would be at least as good as
Nathan to the subsequent hitters and you'd be
saving some of Nathan's fuel for the next time you needed him
with every logical presumption that'd he do better than he was at
this moment..

E-0

Gardenhire's error was looking at the past, not the future.
Nathan had been a veritable St. Christopher, getting a save in 44
of the Twins' 92 victories, "blowing" only three of
those save chances. He had appeared in 73 games, allowed a run in
only 7 of those 73, and had struck out over 11 batters for each 9
innings.

But that's the past. Now matter how confident you are about
someone's abilities, you have to let the present (2-1/3 innings
of relief which is not how Nathan had accumulated his
accomplishments I mentioned in the previous paragraph) shape the
future. As Alvin
Dark, a notoriously tart-tongued manager said, you should
never go out to the mound to remove a pitcher, you should always
go out to put a new pitcher in.

What he meant was you shouldn't be angry about the pitcher's
current troubles, and if you honestly think the incumbent has the
best chance among your options of stifling the next batter, you
shouldn't remove that pitcher. The obverse, though, is you can't
let the good emotions around that player's past heroics nor your
own fear of seeming to be indecisive by not sticking with your
status quo stand in the way of a move for a change. Neither, in a
life-or-death moment like a playoff game, can you let your
concern for whether the pitcher's feelings will be hurt cast a (Don)
pall on the chances your whole team has to succeed.

Obviously, you can make an occasional decision to
leave a hurler in as an experimental move during the season if it
doesn't matter much, or if you need to line up your pitching for
several subsequent games. I suggest that a five-game series
against a very tough team is not the time for that.

BEYOND BASEBALL

In my consulting, I've seen too many managers pull a Fregosi
by not paying close enough attention to the future by marinating
in the past.

I worked as a regional operations manager for an intercity bus
company that took passengers around the country. The head man was
very passionate about his business, but he had certain routes
that had been good for his business over the years. His ridership
had evolved, so some of those old routes weren't the winners they
once were and some others begged out for a little marketing and
yet other possiiblities lay fallow, untried. His unwillingness to
face the present wasn't an actual problem for a long time -- his
cash flow and margins were both quite good.

But a significant portion of his fleet got old at the same
time and he had some bad luck with some of his newer buses. He
just didn't have the rolling stock to service all his routes and
it was decision time. He needed to borrow to buy more buses, but
it was a recession and his lenders wouldn't lend him money. So he
needed to trim routes or level of service on each. He chose to
trim routes, but pulled a Fregosi, and instead of optimizing his
choices based on where the growth was and in which cities he had
good maintenance facilities, it was all based on historical
profitability. He was unrelentingly loyal to the towns and people
and schedule that had made the company rich. The company was gone
after about 18 months, and while he walked off with a decent
retirement, it was a pittance compared to what the outfit was
worth if he'd been paying attention to the future.

I want to be clear; loyalty is a wonderful thing. You can
occasionally take a performance hit either out of loyalty to some
past contribution or, equally, to give a young contributor
experience.

But when a big game or project or product or effort is on the
line, focus on the future, not the past. Don't defoliate a
Gardenhire.

10/10/2004 09:15:00 PM posted by j @ 10/10/2004 09:15:00 PM

Thursday, October 07, 2004

MBxpO: Two Management Lessons fromMontreal's Skipper, Frank Robinson

Reader David Lippman asked:

What is your take on the
Expos fiasco? It seems like that team was designed to fail,
given their lack of talent, "home" games in Puerto
Rico, and the continued uncertainty regarding their future.
How good has Frank Robinson been in trying to lead his team
through all of that?

Frank Robinson's piloting of the Expos holds a couple of good
lessons for managers beyond baseball.

Background on Robinson, if you don't know much about him; if
you do skip down to the first sub-head. Frank
Robinson was one of the top 20 players of the 20th century, a
naturally-gifted all-around player, slugger, baserunner,
outfielder. He was MVP in each league. In every single one of
his 20 seasons of play (leaving out his final season
when he was managing the Indians and appeared only 79 times), his
offensive output was no less than 27% above his league's
composite; this is extraordinary. Half of all players never have
even a single full season where they exceed the league composite
by his least good year.

Robbie was not just a lot better than almost all his fellow
players, he was born that way, with a combination of size, grace,
agility and a good brain in his head. And that, oddly, was his
Achilles Heel. As a manager, he was not particularly effective in
his first eight years, and in his return to Baltimore, where he
had many of his best years as a player, he was very uneven. One
indicator, by the way, of his ordinary performance is the set of
gaps between his assignments; three seasons between the end of
his first gig and starting his second, and the same between his
second and third..

Early in his managerial career, Robbie's Achilles Heel was
that he was so much better than any player who ever played for
him. Robbie seemed to have a hard time dealing with the mere
mortals who were just very good. Like many managers beyond
baseball who have come up through the ranks based on their
extraordinary skills and not just on being the boss' son or knack
for smooth inner-circle politics, being naturally brilliant is
not a free pass to being a good manager, and, in fact, is more
often a wind-drag.

One of the best players who labored for Robbie on that first
manager position in Cleveland was Rico
Carty. Carty was one of the very best pure hitters of his
time, and bounced back repeatedly from terrible injuries
including seven shoulder separations, tuberculosis & an ugly
car wreck to continue to hit beautifully. His approach at the
plate changed after each body-blow, as he adapted to his new,
lesser, body and overcame new limitiations to continue to
achieve. Carty told an interviewer Robbie was hell to play for
because Robbie couldn't help but feel anyone who couldn't, with
practice, do what Robbie had done so effortlessly must be
slacking or just not very good.

The early managerial Robinson couldn't imagine what it was
like to struggle like heck to acheieve at half the Robbie level.
Lots of managers outside of baseball have this challenge.
Sometimes it's because they were promoted specifically because
they were so good at their position. Sometimes, it's because the
new manager is just a super-smart person.

What the Mensa person is missing that perfectly-bright but
clearly-lesser folk have is a sense of effort it can take to be
effective. The Mensa person can confuse natural ability with
accomplishment, can confuse what you come to the table with, with
what you can achieve. When I was in junior high and high school,
the authorities mistakenly assigned me to honors classes a couple
of times - they confused my polymathic set of knowledge and my
quickness with actual intelligence. So sometimes there were a few
of us lesser-talents in classes with the big heads, and it was
there I observed how important the distinction in judgment is
between most of the smart-enough performers and most
of the naturally exceptional.

The exceptional are used to solving problems by catching them
out of thin air. They don't always know how they got there. The
smart-enough have to work through problems and build knowledge
over time. The working through makes it more likely they will see
connections in subsequent problem solving efforts. The
exceptional are not used to failure, but in life occasional
failure is almost guaranteed, and the exceptional get more
frustrated with failure and it affects their judgement and
subsequent decisions. And because the exceptional Mensa types
are, well, exceptional, they're not as used to interacting as
peers, so frequently, it makes efforts that require co-operative
efforts more laden with the overhead of struggling through team
problem solving. In one chemistry honor class I was in, some of
us mistakes (we called ourselves the Pensas, because we had to
think harder to get comparable results) would combine to work
through experiments together, and we could frequently beat the
big heads with better or faster (or both) results. And because
you worked through every step (it didn't just come to you in a
single, coherent vision like a hanging curve over the plate), you
could know how to explain it to someone else because you'd
already broken it down to a sequence of steps.

Not having to work through the steps makes it very difficult
to coach those who don't know them already. And knowing you have
limitations can be the first move towards the ability to
empathasize with a report, and if you can't empathize &
you're not a good coach, it's almost certain you can't manage.

But over time, Robinson has learned to work with lesser
talents. His stay in Whipping-Boy Land, owner-free,
resource-starved, existential-anxiety-dream Montreal, has exposed him to the most-cobbled together
remnant quilt in the majors. Every year it has gotten more
challenging because the relative budget has gone down every year
and the team's best players have moved on in trades or directly
through free-agency. Past an age by which most people with money
have retired, he has taken it on with grace and skill, and mostly
with equanimity. He's squeezed some good stretches out of his
no-name, designed to lose team, and helped develop some of the
better players on it. He's not got any hardware to show for it,
but it's a management gig he can be really proud of.

In between, he matured, in part because of his management
engagements. The Indians were a .500 type team, the Giants, not
that good, and by the time he managed the Orioles, they were in a
decline phase. In the multi-year gaps between his manager
positions, he held other jobs around baseball, coaching for a few
franchises and working for MLB as the discipline czar. He learned
to cope with more organizational adversity than he had
experienced as a player (which did have its challenges, with a
bad arm injury and ugly behavior related to race politics).

Frank Robinson learned to overcome his extraordinary talent
and become a good manager. Others can, too, if they can
distinguish their own extraordinary talents from the efforts of
mere mortals.

LESSON #2: WHEN YOU DO THE JOB EVERYONE
KNOWS IS IMPOSSIBLE

Everyone knows managing Montreal to a pennant is
impossible. Most believed keeping them out of last place would be
impossible. But Robinson got 2nd and 4th place finishes for them
before this year's cellar inhabitation. No one in baseball holds
that finish against Robbie.

It's a perfect situation in some ways.

Beyond baseball, some of the best management positions you can
get are those that come on the heels of others' failures, and in
dire situations as long as everyone knows how bad it is.
If you succeed in such dark times, everyone thinks you're an ace,
and if you fail, well, it was a Montreal Expo situation anyway.
If everyone with authority knows it's awful, you are likely to
get more latitude to experiment, because none of the little men
and women who work hard to block change by feeling and saying
"if it's not broken, don't fix it" are taken seriously
by those on the fence about change.

That said, it's critical people know just how bad it is.
Before you start, you'll need to market accurately (don't
exaggerate; that backfires too often) the degree of existing
failure. You need to get commitment for levels of resources and
co-operation you'll need to turn things around. But inheriting an
obvious meltdown is one of the most forgiving situations a career
manager can get. Your bosses, if you prepare them properly, will
be in a position to perceive whatever you reclaim out of the
situation as gravy.

I can recommend this kind of management position to anyone
with courage who enters a situation everyone knows is
frelled. Like Robbie, you successes will be generally
regarded as your own, your failures as beyond your control.

Monday, October 04, 2004

I do not think
that winning is the most important thing.
I think winning is the only thing. -- attributed to
Bill Veeck

I loved Bill Veeck's creativity and intensity, but his epigram
above is not right in all cases. Baseball itself provides a lot
of examples where winning games isn't the only thing, and these
examples are enlightening about organizations outside baseball,
too.

I was drawn to writing about this topic by reader David
Lippman when he asked:

What is your take on the
Expos fiasco? It seems like that team was designed to fail,
given their lack of talent, "home" games in Puerto
Rico, and the continued uncertainty regarding their future.
How good has Frank Robinson been in trying to lead his team
through all of that?

Thank you D. Lippman...the Expos of recent vintage are a
tragically wonderful management lesson for a bunch of reasons.

LESSON #1: CURRENCY - MANAGEMENT BY
(DIFFERENT) OBJECTIVE

In general, it's safe to say that most baseball organizations
in most seasons manage along the Veeck model: winning a World
Series or at least a pennant is the primary goal. But in
baseball, there are other primary goals.

For a team like the 2003-4 Pittsburgh Pirates, or the 2004
Cleveland Indians, it's a positive trend against the previous
year with experience building for promising young talent and a
chance for management to battle-test that talent and provide hope
for the fans.

For a team like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, it's finishing above
last place.

For the New York Mets, it's competing with a cross-town rival
for the hearts and minds of fans...regional popularity. The
objectives to support that goal could be to win a lot of games,
and certainly that'd be their Plan A to start the season, but
there are many ways to compete, and the Mets have found alternate
paths in the past.

For the Seattle Mariners, it's operating at at least
break-even on the P & L and minimizing perceived risk.

For all of these, a trip to the playoffs is icing, not cake.

In the recent past, for several teams, it was to position
themselves to get a subsidized stadium built, though that era
seems over, between the glut of new stadia and the now-apparent
evidence that if you build it they might,
or might
not, come.

Beyond Baseball, there are many parallels. Some public
companies exist to make their executives a healthy income, while
some are obsessed with shareholder value. Some firms exist for
the egos of their owners (in this model, the firm is most
frequently named after the egotist). Some measure their success
in working on or delivering the coolest products or even just
getting the recognition for making the coolest products. For
some, it's just competing against a particular metric or rival or
even themselves. For some, it's just surviving without rocking
the boat.

Most organizations set out objectives and manage to them, but
in a diverse, competitive endeavor, each will have its own
currency. When you work for an organization, especially when
you're just starting, it's important to absorb and act
recognizing its own currency (and not just your own, or some
"standard" model).

Individual employees have their own currencies, too. Some work
for money, some for glory, some for recognition, some to please
themselves by meeting a standard they set for themselves. As a
manager, it's vital to come to understand each associate's
currency (or currencies).

LESSON #2: WHEN FAILURE IS JOB #1

For the Expos, as Lippman noted, they were designed to fail.
The team is owned by the other Major League team owners as a
consortium, bought to enable one of their internally-beloved
peers, Jeffrey Loria, to have the assets to buy another team,
last year's champion Florida Marlins. So the team is owned,
literally, by the men who own the Expos' daily enemies. Game
theory quickly describes why the consortium owners would
resource-starve the franchise intentionally so it can be a human
punching-bag for those rivals -- so it's no surprise the team has
the
lowest payroll in its division...its closest peer has a
payroll 51% higher than the Expos').

If you own 1/29th of a team and all of another team, where do
your loyalties lie. And you you do have some portion of
decision-making power in the way your minority interest is
invested. Ideally, you'd get all the other 28 owners to invest
more than you did and do it in a way that was quite bad, so
they'd be out their money and yet your own team could beat the
victim-franchise senseless at will. The ideal is just about
unattainable -- so you have to settle for a game-theory silver
medal, which is a low-investment approach that guarantees a
losing record (baseball being a zero sum game, for every loss
there has to be a win, so a losing team puts more wins on the
table for all others to share in), and yet puts some
entertainment on the field.

Baseball has not so distant examples of owning part interest
in a team designed to fail. In the 1950s, the Yankees' main owner
apprently bankrolled in part the man who bought the Philadelphia
Athletics and moved them to Kansas City. This wasn't out in the
open (the other franchisees would have objected), but the Yankees
and Athletics proceeded to become each other's most frequent
trading partners, with an extraordinary number of deals that
seemed to benefit the Yankees more than the Atheltics (though not
always in that one direction). Roger Maris was one of the players
the Yanks obtained in a trade with the As.

You see Expo-style objectives in some companies, though
ownership isn't usually held by rivals. Companies packaging
themselves to be bought or liquidated or where the executives
have designs on buying the business for themselves will
frequently make moves designed to draw down the orgnaization's
apparent (or actual) assets and actual (or apparent) liabilities
to dress up its desirability (or lack of it) as an acquisition
target. For external buyers, it's usually for simplifying the
buyer's analysis, and for internal executives, it's to make the
property look like it's worth less (so they can make a lower
offer when they try to buy).

LESSON #3: HIDDEN AGENDÆ

That designed to lose plan is quite obvious, almost overt.

But there was another currency that was under the surface, and
not made explicit -- teasing more money out of metropolitan
Washington D.C., the Expos long-determined next stop.

MLB ownership flogged chunks of the Expos season off to San
Juan, Puerto Rico for a couple of reasons. One minor one being to
spif the Puertorriquenos for all the wonderful players the
continent has received from P.R. over the years. Another minor
one is to possibly get some additional attendance from fans in
that country for whom even a last place ML team would be a tasty
novelty. I know at least a few people thought the weather would
be better there than in Quebec.

But the real reason, the coup de main here was to
make it appear that MLB had potential suitors that could compete
with metro DC, putting MLB in a better negotiating environment.
San Juan didn't exactly flood the stands at Hi
Bithorn Stadium for the games, but it gave some illusion that
it might be a possibility. Canada was out of the question, even
if the Majors could find a town with more anglophones, something
less Youppified,
because Canada's regulations hinder the application of public
funds for private gain, making many of the ways teams optimize
their take untenable. Cuidad Mexico certainly had the
middle-class population to support a major league team, but the
political situation there is feared. For all the apparent
uncertainty of the Expos situation, and given that MLB had
intentionally destroyed what was left of the Montreal market for
the product since it allowed a major interest in the team to be
sold to Loria in 1999, there was really no high-dollar choice for
a metro area that could sustain a team for at least a decade except
for DC.

Essentially, to anyone looking at the factors that MLB bases
franchise city decisions on, metro DC was by far the most
obvious. But that main suitor was so nostalgic, it had been so
long since they had had even a tragically-flawed
team, they were determined to close the deal, no matter how
little room their MLB counterparts had to maneuver.

Call it the Curse of Pepe Mangual -- a major city taken in by
the Puerto Rico Gambit that to any outside evaluator,
would have been as transparent as the contents of a cup of Wall
Drug "coffee".

A quick side note on the Washington deal I haven't seen
mentioned much online. As you may know, DC has RFK Stadium, a
multi-purpose facility that's over 30 years old, where the
Senators had played before they left town. DC agreed to build a
new park for the team, but MLB agreed that,m to get the team out
of Montreal, they would have them live at RFK for up to three
season. Late last week, a
movement on the DC city council was pushing to get the team,
but once it had moved to DC, to can
the new ballpark and have them play in RFK for a while. As
the mastermind of this bit of aikido, Council member Adrian
Fenty, said "Where else are they going to go? They've
already left Montreal. And no one else has a stadium ready."

This Fenty Gambit is a dangerous one, but not a bad one to
keep in your tool kit. Negotiating backwards once a deal is made
is something you can only do once to someone sitting across the
table, and, if it's in the public eye, the way this or the way
most public company negotiations are held, you can only do once ever,
because everyone is going to know you will let a deal close or
get close to it and then shift the terms. In this case, it might
work, especially if the MLB owners are tired of their
co-ownership of the Expos (a potential distraction that may be
tying up capital for some teams' owners). The DC council will
probably never have to negotiate a sports franchise import again,
so poisoning the well might be worth it to them. Fenty seems to
think the $500 million is a loser because it comes from a
regressive tax of businesses' gross receipts as aprt of the
package. And he thinks big money would go farther on rec centers
and libraries. If you're going to poison a well, do it for
something you believe in, as it appears Fenty does, rather than
just doing it because you can get away with it.

BEYOND BASEBALL

The lessons for organizations outside of baseball are clear.

Never fall in love with a deal so much you can't
negotiate reasonably over it.

Keep in mind that every organization has its own
currencies, what it defines as success and how it
measures that.

Always try to discern the bits of glitter on a deal meant to distract you -- the no-payments-until-St. Francis of Assisi Day package or the free 2-liter bottle of Jolt -- especially if the party across the table has a history of mendacity during negotiations.